Variability and situatedness of human emotions: Comment on "The quartet theory of human emotions: An integrative and neurofunctional model" by S. Koelsch et al.

We commend Koelsch and colleagues [14] for developing a broad and integrative explanation of the neurobiological foundations of emotions. We especially welcome this framework’s emphasis on the interaction between language and emotion, and its focus on the characteristically human moral emotions. Emotions elicited by art and aesthetics also seem to be distinctively human, but comparatively little research has been devoted to understanding these. This is probably because they are usually viewed as atypical in several respects. William James [12], for instance, regarded emotional responses to artworks and aesthetic qualities as subtler emotions, because they lacked the strong bodily changes and adaptive value characteristic of coarser emotions, such as joy, anger, or fear. This view is still predominant today, and aesthetic emotions are often distinguished from everyday emotions [13]. However, the notion of a class of aesthetic emotions, separate from everyday emotions, rests on the questionable assumption that artistic and aesthetic experiences and activities are different in essence from everyday experiences and activities. The discontinuity between “aesthetic experience [and] normal processes of living” [9, p. 10], however, is the product of social and cultural developments in Europe during the 18th century [7,15,20]. Distinctions that oppose art to craft, or aesthetic to practical, in reference to objects, behaviors, experiences, and emotions, make little sense in a broader historic and geographic context [1,7,20], and hinder empirical research [7]. Emotions in response to art and aesthetic qualities are fundamentally variable and situated. Research has shown that they are profoundly shaped by cultural practices and beliefs [1], they vary substantially between and within individuals [11,21], and they are highly susceptible to semantic framing [10] and context [4,5]. Psychological constructionist models of emotion [3,19] adequately account for these findings. From this perspective, people experience emotions in response to artworks and aesthetic features when, using knowledge stored from past experience, they assign meaning to their inner states, both sensory (related to the perception of the artistic or aesthetic object) and affective (especially their bodily sensations of pleasure–displeasure and arousal). Situational or contextual features contribute to give meaning—commonly of personal, societal or cultural relevance—to these states. The construction of these emotional experiences relies on domain-general psychological processes, which are not specific to any cat-